Google Play Books: Better sleep after reading with new Night Light

Reading in bed is basically a national pastime. Most bookworms would agree that at the end of a long day, when you’re knackered after work or school, one of the best things to do is to lie on your bed and curl up with a good book, whether it’s a physical one or an ebook.According to an official blog post, reading activity increases between 8:00pm and 10:00pm local time, but the bright blue light coming from user’s phones hurts their eyes when they’re in the dark and prevents them from having a restful sleep afterwards.

But staring at the bright screen of an e-book before sleep can be damaging to the eyes, while the blue light from smartphones and tablets may suppress our bodies’ production of melatonin, causing major sleep problems. So it’s good news that Google has added a light filter to its Play Books app, which gradually tapers the amount of blue light used by your display as you inch closer to bedtime.

This is why the Night Light mode comes in handy, as it automatically adapts to the natural light and the color adjustment makes it easier and more pleasant to read. Rolling out now to Android and iOS, Night Light can be activated on your phone or tablet via a pop-up notification the next time you open a digital book. But what is nice is how it ensures that the app displays text with increasingly red-green light, providing warmer pink-orange hues, as the evening wears on.

Amazon took a similar step earlier this month, updating Fire Tablets with Blue Shade, which “uses specialized filters to limit exposure to blue light.” The free feature—available on Fire HD 10, Fire HD 8, and Fire tablets (video below)—can be turned on or off with a single tap, and lets users drop the display brightness to an “ultra-low level.” For more, see How to Put Free Ebooks on Your Amazon Kindle. Breus, known as “sleep doctor”, affirms that blue light filtering can help people to use their devices from 30 to 60 minutes longer than without it.